Swapped chemicals leads to brown grass at cemetery in Fort Morgan

City working toward getting it all green again by next spring

By Jenni Grubbs

Times Staff Writer

Posted:
09/09/2013 09:00:00 PM MDT

A mishap with an employee using herbicide instead of fertilizer about a month ago caused the current brown stretch of grass around the cemetery in Fort Morgan according to Parks Superintendent Doak Duke. "Hopefully, by next spring you won't be able to tell there's any difference there," Duke said. "I know it doesn't look good right now, but we'll just have to be patient." (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

If the outer edge of the cemetery looks brown instead of green to Fort Morgan residents, it's not due to a problem with their vision, and winter has not come early.

A mistake by a Parks Department worker about a month ago in the cemetery led to the current ring of withering grass, according to Parks Superintendent Doak Duke.

Instead of spraying fertilizer, the unidentified worker applied a low-level herbicide, he said.

"It was an unfortunate circumstance," City Manager Jeff Wells said. "But once it was applied, we had to let it run its course."

The grass should recover with care and time, Duke said, since the herbicide did not poison the ground, instead just killing the visible above-ground plants.

"We're hoping that we just made it really sick," he said.

To deal with it, Parks Department workers were overseeding the currently brown areas, and at least one portion of the ground would get new sod entirely, Duke said.

"We are redoing one area where the sod was higher than the curb level," Duke said.

Wells said this was a planned project that got expedited because of the chemicals issue.

The chemicals mishap was expected to cost the city less than $2,000 and possibly less than $1,000 in grass seed and labor, Duke said.

Wells said the mix-up with chemicals happened because of a "lack of oversight" of some workers, but added that the "appropriate measures" had been taken to ensure all the workers would use the correct chemicals in the future.

"The big concern is it's going to look ugly for a while," Wells said, but one good thing coming out of it was more emphasis on education about chemicals for the workers.

"We need to make sure we read the labels," Duke said.

Wells also said that the brown grass had nothing to do with a lack of watering, pointing to the tighter limits the city has been under this year for using well water for parks irrigation.

"I think a lot of people think it's a water issue," he said. "That's not the case."

Duke and Wells both said the problem should be taken care of given a little time.

"Hopefully, by next spring you won't be able to tell there's any difference there," Duke said. "I know it doesn't look good right now, but we'll just have to be patient."